


From Willow Rosenberg to the Looney Tunes -  the healing nature of fictional characters in stories

by shadowkat67



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Comics), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Fandom Allusions & Cliches & References, Literary References & Allusions, Looney Tunes References, Meta, Television
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:54:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22408267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowkat67/pseuds/shadowkat67
Kudos: 1





	From Willow Rosenberg to the Looney Tunes -  the healing nature of fictional characters in stories

Today..I ran into five-six homeless people, that I noticed. All people of color. All bundled up, at least there's that. They appeared to be warm. Scarves. Mittens. Layers. On this frigid day. They sat huddled on the floor of subway passageways, tin cans out, begging. Some on the heated grates on sidewalks. Or wandering the subway itself, hat in hand. Explaining that they were homeless due to a lost job, or various other reasons. Normally, I ignore...but today, I just couldn't. Not when I passed the man with the bandaged eye for the second time this week, half blind, huddled against the wall, with the small scratched out sign that he'd been beaten up while sleeping on the subway. I promised myself that if I saw him again, I would stop and hand him a dime. I gave him three dollars, a pittance. At least, others had as well. Further down, a man was railing at all who would listen. Screaming and ranting at the top of his lungs. His voice competed with the Scottish Bag Pipes lonely wail of Sweet By and By. And in between, a blind man sat on a mat, hands crossed on his lap, meditating.

New York City is not a safe comfortable place to live. It screams and shouts at you, to be noticed. With raw wounds scraped along its pretty glistening sides.

Been pondering the past lately...past transgressions, people who have drifted off and some who have drifted back again into my life, seemingly out of nowhere. My friend Maribeth Martell, aka [](http://embers-log.livejournal.com/profile)[**embers_log**](http://embers-log.livejournal.com/) , continues to haunt the social media pages...on Facebook her birthday was announced as if she was still among us, she'd have been 64, and on Good Reads, I see which books she liked and didn't...that I'm reading. She didn't live long enough to read mine, although she'd seen some introductory chapters. And whenever I post a picture to my livejournal, for some reason or other her name appears in the album posting box. She died two years ago of colitis - an infection that got worse and worse. Even though we'd begun to drift apart before she died, I miss her. An old acquaintance from my college days just contacted me out of nowhere. Hadn't heard from her since 1987 - when we traveled around Britain together. She was much older than I was at the time, thinking 30s or 40s. Found me on LinkedIn. And a few people have popped up again on livejournal, who I thought were basically gone. Then there's the little boy who told my best bud to punch me in the stomach when I was 6 years of age. Or maybe 5. I still vividly remember it. We were friends. We did get over that...kids do. But they moved soon after, both of them did. He was blond, white blond hair, and blue eyes. Name of Derek. I see him vividly sitting on a tree in my mind's eye. He moved out of the house that my best friend moved into, right next door to us. He could climb poles. He taught me to climb poles. I don't remember his last name. I don't know what happened to him.

The past never quite goes away does it? Just sort of floats in the ether of one's brain...around and around. My Granny at the end of her life remembered her childhood better than she did what happened a minute ago.

So...I revisited this old Buffy essay I wrote, about Willow, the other day - which I'd forgotten. And it said something that well made me sit up and take notice:  
  


> When the dream ends [Willow's dream in the Buffy episode, Restless] - Willow is literally choking on the chaotic emotions inside her, the order her spirit had imposed on them stripped from her by the first slayer.
> 
> In Willow's dream we see the duality of several characters. Buffy is both the ditzy flapper girl and the hard slayer saving her friends. Xander is the smart alec friend and the cruel classmate. Harmony is the sweet friendly milkmaid and the biting social climber. Riley is the Cowboy and the cardboard actor with no substance, rushing to the rescue but leaving chaos in his wake. Giles is the director attempting to install order yet losing control by his inability to understand the actors needs, the absentminded professor if you will. Tara is the spirit guide, kind supportive, yet also judgmental and forcing Willow to face what's inside. And finally Willow - Willow is the geeky nerdy girl doing the book report and the girl controlling Tara with a spell. Janus - the duality of male and female, light and dark lying side by side. Even Willow's book: the Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe expresses this theme of dark and light - in the Witch (female dark chaotic) and Aslan - the Lion (male light order.) The question posed at the end of Willow's dream is will she be able to incorporate both or will the chaotic emotions boiling up inside destroy her spirit and consume her light?
> 
> Part of growing up is learning how to deal with past transgressions and one's identity, whether that be sexual, spiritual or mental. Willow has never figured out how to do this. She either bottles it up inside or lashes out. In fact - the source of her power, may be all those dark bottled up emotions boiling up inside her. Instead of dealing, she hides or represses under a sweet facade, bottling up even more.
> 
> On her journey - Willow slips into the pitfalls of Kurtz in _The Heart of Darkness_. Or the surfer boy in _Apocalypse Now_ \- who looks forward to the trip but can't deal with the pain he finds on the other side. Like Kurtz and the surfer boy, Willow is an idealist. She believes the world should be a bright and rosy place and worse, believes she has the power to make it so. She doesn't. The problem with trying to save the world - is sometimes it's a chore just trying to save yourself.
> 
> It's ironic really - because Willow always came across as the most moral and non-judgmental of the group. She accepted everyone - even Faith, at first. Her spirit held them together. But beneath all that - are some heavy duty fears that date back to her childhood. Like all of us, Willow has chaos/emotion and order/spirit battling inside her. She hasn't figured out how to incorporate them yet partly because she's still carrying her childhood on her back. As she puts it to Tara about Ms. Kitty -"I don't know…she's not fully grown yet. I have time. " In Willow's mind she has plenty of time. But does she? Really?  
> 

Willow was on the surface that stock nerdy-geeky sidekick that everyone knew or was in high school. Although insanely bright (not) and with magic(not). If, however, you strip that away or look it at metaphorically...I think a lot of people see themselves in Willow. I certainly did. I was the wallflower. Awkward with boys, and girls. Quirky. Wore the wrong clothes. Was ruthlessly teased and bullied and shamed. I don't know about anyone else, but I developed "a fuck you" attitude after a while, much like Willow did. And in Willow, I see echoes of my own unbridled rage and fury.

And I totally get the savior complex -- the desire to save people, to make the world better. Buffy really didn't have it, she just wanted to be Cordy, and have fun. Willow, however, wanted desperately to be the hero, to stop the bullies, to save others. To take down people like Warren. But the world, damn it, kept putting obstacles in her way and gave the role of superhero to the ditzy cheerleader.

But... what really hit me about my old essay, and it is old, I wrote it in 2002..was this feeling of a broken spirit. Willow had all this power, she was awesome, the most loved, yet because her spirit was broken...she just saw the echo of those past transgressions wherever she looked or her fear of them. She saw the rejections, the teasing, the shame. Harmony hung over her, undead, biting. The seemingly harmless mean girl, who just would not die. Pretty, vapid, and cruel...bubbling, and vivacious, every guy's wet dream, and apparently some women's as well. She tries to be friends with Harmony, but she bites her or stabs her in the back, every single time. And these Harmony's? They pollute our lives. They slink in and out of the shadows, beautiful, and impossible to overlook or avoid. Particularly if ...your spirit is struggling to breathe.

Willow's spirit chokes her, she's so cut off from it. And she almost loses everything as a result of it. She hits rock bottom. I get the metaphor there as well...the feeling of falling into an abyss, and trying to claw one's way out. Which she does...although way too quickly, but it is a television show.

It's odd, but in order to rejoin the others...she's sent off for a while with Giles, the intellect. Although, first, and I almost forgot this...because it is really important from a metaphorical standpoint - it's the heart that saves the spirit. Xander, the heart of the group -- saves Willow, the spirit. Emotion. Forgiveness. Kindness. Love. Quells the rage boiling within.

Then off with intellect to figure it all out.

When she returns...she tries to hide from the heart and the body/hands. The body/the hands, the earth, the real, the world. Which she threw into the grave and now fears to see again. Her judge and jury. And almost gets skinned alive as a result. Or stripped of her spirit, naked and raw. It's not until she reveals herself to the heart and hands...that she begins to heal in actuality. And finally, is forced to face the past transgressions...first Amy, an old friend and enemy (the poisonous friend from her childhood), and then Warren (who she killed with her rage - who represents all the bullies, mean boys and girls who shamed her, who took what she had away). Once these two bridges are crossed - she is able to love again, and enter into the light.

I really like the healing nature or arc of that story. I think that's what stories are meant to do. To give us a way to handle things...without getting too personal. To find our way out of the dark...sort of like a flashlight.

Anyhow, a while back, I wrote this book and self-published it. Called **Doing Time on Planet Earth** (see icon), it's a play on words. The phrase means mundane. Or drudgery. Feeling drug into the abyss. It features three people, all of which feel lost, all of whom have broken spirits...due to past transgressions, whether they be familial in nature or peer related, or even work related. One of the three has reacted with rage, she's sort of the Willow of the story. People who read it at work wanted to know which character was me, reader's always ask this question. People used to ask Joss Whedon which character represented him in Buffy, he flippantly would say Xander. Then later, Buffy, and at another point Willow. Although, I think they all probably did, and didn't at the same time. Same with me -- all the characters in Doing Time are part of me, and at the same time they aren't -- they exist outside of me, like children that I'd given birth to would. With their own views and ideals. Representative of me and not at the same time.

In my book, I reference fandom a lot, the fan boards...where two of the protagonists meet and become close friends. They know each other, and they really don't at the same time. One of them, Hope Wexler, who is an embezzler and identity thief - collects Loony Tunes action figures. It should be noted that even though she is a thief, she has a moral code -- she only steals from corporations that are laying off employees and only the identities of dead people. The characters she identifies with are Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner. And it's through the Looney Tunes characters that she connects with Kenny, a blind accountant that she is currently working with. He can't see her, but then she's in disguise. But he does see her, better than anyone, just as he sees and appreciates the Loony Tunes in greater depth than she does.

Below is a snippet from this novel that...is one of the reasons I decided to self-publish. Because every publishing contact I sent it to - wanted me to remove it. They were blind to the fact that it was central to the themes of my book, it was vital to understanding the relationship between various characters and how they viewed the world. But not everyone will see it - because not everyone thinks the same way. If you don't think metaphorically, some of this will most likely jump over your head. You might think it boring or silly or why did she include this. I don't know. I found some of the reactions.. very frustrating. I remember begging my contact to see it...to give it a chance, but she cut me off without a response. None at all. It wasn't a quick read, a page turner, a thriller. It fell outside the box, outside the lines.

Anyhow, below is the scene, which is about how we will often use fictional characters to express how we feel about ourselves or who we are. Whether it be Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote, or Willow Rosenberg. In the scene, Kenny identifies with Wile E and Daffy, while Hope in direct contrast is identifying with the much cooler Bugs Bunny and Road Runner.

The conversation is between Hope and Kenny. It is their first date. Takes place in a coffee shop in Coliseum Books in 2004, across from Bryant Park in the fall. Kenny is blind. Hope is using an alias, and working for the same company that he is as a contract administrator. She plans on embezzling from the company at some point. While they are talking, a woman that she'd met at a fandom concert, whose car she borrowed without permission, appears to recognize her. Hope during the conversation is trying to explain herself to Kenny by using a Looney Tune character that she identifies with...but she's not sure she is connecting with him, even though she desperately wants to. At the same time, she knows she has to stay hidden from him, she can't risk revealing who she is...and is on the verge of fleeing his company.

>   
>  “So, you collect Pez dispensers?” [Kenny asked]
> 
> “Pez? No no, Looney Tunes characters. I have a whole set of the rubber action figures. Bugs Bunny. Sylvester. Yosemite Sam. My fav’s Bugs, he was always able to get away with anything.” She bowed her head. “It’s a silly collection but it makes me happy.”
> 
> “I get that. I collect vintage cartoons myself. I have the classic Looney Tunes set on DVD as well as the entire Chuck Jones Collection. And Tom and Jerry.”
> 
> “But you’re –“
> 
> “Blind? I don’t have to see them to enjoy them. Plus, I haven’t always been this way.”
> 
> “That’s right, you told me you had some sort of accident when you were a teenager?”
> 
> “Sixteen years old – a car ran into my bicycle, tore me up pretty bad. I was cutting behind a school bus at the time, and lucky my eyesight was the only thing that went. It could have been much worse. Mother says I have a tough noggin, so I’m hard to kill.” He tapped his head. “I remember the things that happened before that pretty well though. Visual memory is like that. It becomes imprinted once you lose the ability to add new images at least that’s what the doctors told us. Mother and me. With cartoons, it’s mostly music and sound effects anyway – I hear those. The drawings and pictures I create in my head.”
> 
> Hope nodded, gazing past him to the window and the people hurrying by, some with umbrellas. According to Caddy it had poured buckets around five, and it was almost six-thirty now, according to her watch. The sky on the way to Coliseum had resembled a leaky ceiling, drops of rain splattering her arms here and there as she had darted around people. “You can tell what is happening just by listening to the sound? Isn’t most of it visual?”
> 
> “Not really, no. When Sylvester traps Tweety, you hear Tweety yelp and the clutch of Sylvester’s claws. Or the Road Runner’s feet zooming away as the Coyote blows himself up. Plus there’s the musical cues.”
> 
> “Road Runner was always one of my fav,” Hope said. “How he’d slip through the Coyote’s clutches every time.”
> 
> “Yet there’s a certain charm to ole Wile E. He came up with some ingenious methods of capture. It wasn’t brains that aided Road Runner so much as luck.”
> 
> “You think? I’d say Wile E did himself in. Road Runner didn’t have to do anything, just let Wile E Coyote outsmart himself. That’s the real art of any con or game – letting the other fellow think that they have the upper hand, think you’re taking one road when you’re really taking the other. Road Runner played Wile E, made him think he could go through that fake tunnel in the cliff face.”
> 
> “It’s been a while since I’ve seen the visuals, but doesn’t the Road Runner go through the fake tunnel?”
> 
> Hope shrugged. “Yeah, but if he does, why can’t Wile E?”
> 
> “That always bothered me. Why can’t Wile E Coyote get through the fake tunnel?”
> 
> “Maybe because he knows it’s fake. He knows that it’s just a picture on the wall. Road Runner, on the other hand, doesn’t think about it, he just sees the tunnel and goes right on through. Wile E thinks too much. He’s too aware of his surroundings, while Road Runner just likes to run.”
> 
> “But does Road Runner see anything while he’s running? He’s so oblivious, he never notices anyone or anything, nor cares.”
> 
> Hope studied her coffee cup, still more than half full. “He’s just a road runner – what’s there to care about but staying alive another day, eating a good meal, and getting to the next place?” She looked past Kenny, towards the window again, and met the eyes of a young blond woman smoking a cigarette. The woman looked vaguely familiar: Hope scanned her memory for the face.
> 
> “What’s interesting about the Loony Tunes universe-- Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird, even the Road Runner – is that the stories are always about one character running or outmaneuvering another.” Kenny felt for the coffee cup he’d rested on the table, feeling its rim, then lifted it to his lips, sipping. When he finished, he lowered it in a direct line to the table, set it down in the same spot, not spilling a drop. “Same thing with the Tom and Jerry cartoons, particularly the older ones, where the cute blue cat -- at least I think it’s blue, but it could be gray, I remember it as blue though-- struggles to catch the smarter and nicer brown mouse.”
> 
> Hope wondered as he spoke how he could appreciate Tom and Jerry without the visuals. Unlike Bugs, Daffy and the other characters, they never spoke – all you had were sound effects.
> 
> “The target in all of these cartoons is portrayed as the smarter party, the more worthy. And, in each case, he escapes without a scratch.”
> 
> “Except for Daffy.” The blond woman across from her, on the other side of the glass, was staring. Her mouth hung open; her eyes were creased in thought. Her hair was cut in layers, with white-blond highlights. She wore a pink short-sleeved cotton top and long light gray pants; the look reminded Hope of the girls she’d seen recently at the Charleyboy gig.
> 
> “Daffy may have been the most complex character in the universe. I have the first Daffy cartoon ever created. In that cartoon, it’s clear that he was constructed as the counter to Bugs Bunny. Or the Hardy to Stan’s Laurel. The fall guy. The klutz. The never-do-well. He envies Bugs, wants everything Bugs has. But each time he attempts to take on Bugs’ role – be Bugs -- he falls flat on his face.”
> 
> Hope pushed her chair back from the table. It couldn’t be. She thought back. The blond chick had mentioned something about working in the building close to her at some fashion company and they’d laughed over it. Above a bookstore and right next door to Bryant Park, close proximity to the international fashion shows springing up under the big white tents each fall and spring. ‘Give me a ring’, she’d said, ‘we’ll do lunch. Or better yet, I’ll give you a pass to see the show. Who knows you might even catch Madonna.’
> 
> “Yet, with Daffy, his weakness breaks your heart. He wants to be more than he is, he wants to be the star of the show, the main attraction, the great detective . He can’t quite deal with being relegated to sidekick. The music, if you listen, clues you in to when he’ll fall. Daffy’s theme is a series of musical near-misses, stops and starts, wacky, resembling a musical note falling down a hill. While Bug’s theme is sharper, self-assured, the musical note hits a high point. Even the voices signify the differences. Bugs can mimic Daffy, but Daffy can’t wrap his tongue around Bugs. Bugs’ voice contains the hard-hitting twang of the worldly Brooklynite, with all the harsh consonants and dropped mangled vowels. Daffy’s is nasal, harsh to the ear with a literal whining undertone.”
> 
> “Kenny, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go.”
> 
> “Why? What’s up?”
> 
> “Nothing, I-I just remembered an appointment is all.” She got up and grabbed her purse. The blond chick turned away from the window and flipped open her cell. “Can we talk later?” Hope touched his hand, ducking to the right of him, using him as a shield to block the chick’s view. It hadn’t occurred to her before what a good shield Kenny made.
> 
> “Sure…can I walk you out?”
> 
> “No, I’ll just go out the back. You stay here and finish your coffee.” She tapped the table.
> 
> “Okay…take care, Hope. I’ll see you on the morrow.”
> 
> Hope weeded her way between the bookshelves, careful to stay out of sight of the windows. Within minutes she was hailing a cab home. She never looked back, she’d learned long ago not to look behind her when she was running from something. Just like the Road Runner, she thought with a laugh, eyes focused on the road ahead.  
> 

The above excerpt depicts how people use characters to explain themselves to each other in a safe way. A healing way. Taking on various archtypes.

Art, I think, is how we relate to the world when its too painful to do so directly. A way to express what's inside..without exposing oneself.

I think though often...people don't see it. Too quickly read or skimmed over. We forget to read what isn't written or what the writer hasn't said, but only implied. And so much gets lost in translation, and well...in misinterpretation.


End file.
